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Recettes
Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.
Ojojo is a fritter made from grated water yam, and it belongs to the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria. It is finger food and street food, sold from roadside stands and made at home on weekend mornings, and it follows more or less the same procedure as akara without the beans.
Water yam, isu ewura, is what makes it work. It is wetter and more mucilaginous than the white yam used for pounding or frying, and grated it holds together in the oil without any flour or binder at all. That is the whole trick of the dish: no egg, no batter, nothing but yam, onion, pepper and crayfish, held together by the yam's own starch.
The texture people are after is crisp on the outside and soft, almost fluffy, inside, and that balance is what separates a good ojojo from a dense one. Grating by hand is the traditional method and gives the most reliable result; a blender works but has to be used sparingly, since water yam breaks down very quickly and too much added water leaves a mixture that will not hold its shape in the pan. It shares its main ingredient with ikokore, the Ijebu water yam pottage, which is a different dish entirely.
Sambusas are fried triangular pastries with a spiced filling, and they are the Somali entry in a family of stuffed pastries stretching from the Middle East through the Horn of Africa to South and Southeast Asia. In Somalia they are snack and appetizer food, though they are most associated with occasions.
Ramadan is the occasion above all. Sambusas are what breaks the fast after sundown, portable and substantial enough to eat standing, and Somali households make them in large quantities through the month. That association is strong enough that many families make them at no other time of year.
The filling is where they diverge from the Indian samosa they resemble. Sambusa filling is typically spiced ground beef, seasoned with cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and turmeric and finished with fresh coriander, giving a warm, aromatic profile rather than the hot, tamarind-and-chilli one of many samosas. Lentil, potato and onion versions exist. The pastry is thinner too. Many Somali cooks in the diaspora now use spring roll or egg roll wrappers instead of making dough, which is a practical shortcut that a good many of them will say improves the result.
Chin chin is fried dough cut into small pieces, and it is the most widely eaten snack in Nigeria. The texture sits between a cracker and a dry cake, and how hard it should be is the thing people have opinions about, with preferences running from soft and cakey to properly tooth breaking.
It began as occasion food, made for birthdays and for Christmas, and the making of it was a household event that children were put to work on. That has changed: it is now sold at every street corner, in every grocery store and supermarket, and it is as ordinary as a packet of biscuits. It is also made across West Africa, and Ghanaians call it achomo.
Flour, sugar, milk and butter are the base, with eggs, nutmeg and baking powder optional depending on the texture wanted. Nutmeg is the flavouring most associated with the Nigerian version, and the variations run to cinnamon, vanilla, cocoa and ground pepper. The three levers are simple enough to state: more butter and baking powder makes it soft, leaving out the egg and the baking powder makes it hard, and everything else is a matter of where between those you want to land.
Kuli kuli is a peanut snack eaten across Nigeria, Benin, northern Cameroon and Ghana, and it is one of the most widely recognised street foods in West Africa. It is made from peanuts alone, and the technique is what makes it: the oil is deliberately pressed out of the ground paste before the remaining solids are shaped and fried.
That extraction is the point. Removing the oil leaves a dense, dry paste that fries into something genuinely crunchy rather than soft, and it also produces the frying oil as a by-product, so nothing is wasted. It is a piece of processing knowledge that predates industrial oil pressing and is still done by hand in Hausa communities in northern Nigeria, where the snack has its strongest association.
It takes different shapes in different places: small sticks, rings, flat discs and irregular pieces are all standard, and the form varies by region and by seller. English names for it, groundnut cake and peanut snack among them, are approximations rather than translations. Kuli kuli is eaten on its own, mixed into garri with sugar and water, crumbled over salad, or served alongside fura and koko. Crushed to a powder it becomes the peanut component of suya spice, which is where most people outside the region encounter it without knowing.